Mayayana wrote:

What often gets missed in these discussions is
that the design of Windows is not primarily for
security but rather for corporate customers.

This is a great point that the design of Windows is mostly for Corporate IT
needs, and not for a logical placement of files.

Even IE is designed to allow IT to completely
control employee behavior, by overriding settings with
Registry settings the employee can't access. That's
what allowed AOL to wrap IE and provide their own
browser that they controlled.

I wasn't aware of this, which makes sense, and which is yet another reason
to never use what Microsoft provides by way of web browsers.

If you own your computer and use it alone it's nuts
to store all your personal and config files several layers
down in a catacomb of real, fake and hidden folders
where you'll never find them.

It always made me think the coders were nut that the cascaded menus were
kept in a deeply embedded "roaming" directory, which had an insane number
of extraneous levels of hierarchy just to get to the beginning.

Why shouldn't software be in "Programs", without a
space in the name to screw up command line?

Agreed. Or, even "apps" or "progs" so that it's easier to type.
There's no more value to the name "Program Files" than to "Programs".

Why
shouldn't work files be in C:|Files, or in a subfolder of
the program folder? (There's no need to sacrifice
security if data files are kept in a subfolder.) The only
reason not to do that is because you've been shoehorned
onto a corporate workstation.

I use keep only four hierarchies in common use:
1. C:\apps (could as well be called C:\programs)
2. C:\data (this contains all my files I want to save)
3. C:\tmp (this contains files that I'm currently working on)
4. C:\data\{menus} (these are usually the menus via a link)

The mess Microsoft have made -- first by not serving
SOHo customers specifically and second by trying to
take over the system -- is why so much software is
now "portable". All that really means is that it doesn't use
the Registry and doesn't get installed. It bypasses the
convoluted mess of software installed on workstations.

I've never quite understood whether portable is useful or not for programs
that are on a desktop that you use every day. The one disadvantage of
portable apps is that Windows 10 hates to make them the default app.

I'm sure there should be a way around that limitation of Windows though.

Actually, probably half of the software I use doesn't
even have an installer. I put it all in Program Files because
I find that easy, but I didn't need to.

An advantage of NOT putting things in program files is the same reason
teachers wipe the whiteboard after class. Anything that shows up afterward
wasn't put there by the teacher.

Another advantage is that a /lot/ of programs aren't in the right-click
menu by default, so it is better to know where you put the program than to
have to guess where it felt like putting itself.